Link List

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Evolution as ideology?

There are no life-or-death consequences to denying evolution or global warming by individuals. Your worldview may help you orient your life, comfort or intimidate you, or whatever. But (in our country, at least) you don't go to jail for being stupid, for not accepting the truth of evolution (or for being too zealously deterministic about how evolution works).

Society may gain if people adhere to some coherent ideology, even if it's contrary to facts that are already known. After all, society functioned up until 200 years or so ago, without any knowledge of evolution in the modern sense. The Greeks did perfectly well before Christ was born, and the Christian world did perfectly well before Mohammed or Joseph Smith came along to claim to provide correctives.

Of course, 'perfectly well' means society functioned. They had awful murder and mayhem, disease and unfairness and dishonor, as well as good things in life. But there's no evidence that society does better with one ideology than another--on a general level.

Even in a purely religious state, that denies evolution of species, health care research on the 'evolution' of antibiotic resistance can go on, and so on. Things might be a bit different in regard to global warming, because the future may well depend in various ways on whether we act according to warming warnings or not. But even if we are climate ostriches, society will adjust to the disruptions and trauma. We've always had disruptions and trauma.

So, if we're not just being tribal about our own ideology, what is the point of railing against those who don't believe in evolution? That such is a benighted way to view the world, even willfully so since the facts are there for anyone to see, shouldn't upset us....unless it's because we fell threatened by that particular tribalism (remembering, for example, witch trials and auto da fe, done in the name of religion).

When one takes a broader anthropological perspective, is railing against evolution any more harmful to people's lives than hating the Yankees?

Of course, for those of us who try, at least, to understand the real world as it actually is, including the fascinating facts of evolution, those beliefs are important to cling to, at least for personal edification. And if we make our living that way, it's not so different from making a living as a minister....

11 comments:

Hey! I had an eerily similar post in mind for while you're away ... riffing on the benefits (like rooting for the Yankees!) of denying evolution and climate science, etc... and how you can live a perfectly fine life in complete denial of these things.

When one takes a broader anthropological perspective, is railing against evolution any more harmful to people's lives than hating the Yankees?

Railing against evolution is railing against science, as is abundantly clear in American politics. Denying evolution is not at al analogous to hating the Yankees. I dislike many things about evolution and what is has made us, but that is of course besides the point.

Our point was different, Bjorn. We think the US is a place of incredible demagoguery these day,s with its formalized denial of knowledge and embracing of ignorance. We don't like that at all.

But our point was different, which is that a human society can exist with any sort of belief system. Believing in evolution might make certain kinds of technical things more likely, but societies have existed for 100,000 years without such an understanding, and they could do so again. It's in that sense that we compared that kind of cretinous belief to liking the Yankees. We don't trivialize willful disbelief in science. But whether someone with even half an education would find that appealing is a totallly different question.

And, Jim, yes rooting against the Yankees has no effect on them (unfortunately). Lobbying against evolution has an effect (unfortunately). But society, even if unsavory, can function with the Yankees and without evolution (unfortunately).

Comments

We always welcome comments, but we moderate them to reduce spam, gratuitous unkindness and so forth. Because we moderate comments, they won't appear on the blog until one of us publishes them, but we try to do that in a timely way.

We've had to make a change to the commenting page. People had told us that Blogger was eating their comments, so now, rather than embedding comment editing with the posts, it has to be done on a separate, full page. Unfortunately, the 'reply' option has disappeared so comments will just follow one another. We'll see how this goes.